Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Milt Gross, 20th Century Renaissance Man

There used to be a great magazine called "Cartoonists Profiles"

that featured articles about every imaginable kind of cartoonist. Mike Fontanelli brought over this issue which featured an article about Milt Gross who was not only a top cartoonist, but a playwright, a gag man for Charlie Chaplin, an animator and a hundred other things.

He was all these things and more in an age of giants - During America's Golden Age - when it seems almost everyone was talented and no one could have imagined that popular amateurism was mere decades away.

Look how cool his early "Mutt 'N' Jeff" style was! Totally different than his own personal style that came a bit later.

who spends every red cent I pay him on great old comic strips.Marc told me he bought a bunch of Gross strips from 1930 and 31 and that they were among his best.Here's 3 of them and they are beautiful all right.Look at the great mood in this last one! I love all his compositions. So clever. Every shape he draws is beautiful.

Great stuff! I didn't knew that about Chaplin, but the tought of him lying down scared of who might be after the door sure made me laugh... Also, Milt Gross is brilliant, and it's just one of many cartoon heroes I would've never heard of if it wasn't you and your blog, Mr. K.

My drawings also have been improving since I took your Preston Blair lessons... I was lucky enough to find an online version of the whole book, translated to portuguese!

Anyway, thanks a lot for what you're doing, and I hope to see George Liquor on TV soon!

I used to get this magazine.It was incredibly right wing, if I recall.They didn't like your Ren and Stimpy show at all.My favorite section was Ask Leo, where readers would ask a man in a wig about 2B pencils and which sharpeners were best for cartoonists.I recall someone asked him why there weren't many female cartoonists and he said it was because women weren't that funny, and proof of this was that there weren't many female cartoonists.Obviously there were complaints about this because in the next issue Leo said something like "Some people may disagree with me but it's my column, so shut up".

Hey John, i haven't been on your blog in awhile and i read that you wanted to comment on some of the work that people submitted on your blog about George Liquor's layout poses/ storyboards. You can use my stuff as an example if you like and thanks for all the posts I got a lot of reading to do.

As a fan of old comic strips myself, it never fails to amaze me how Herriman could essentially repeat the exact same premise with the most predictable ending over and over again and still make it positively surreal and brilliant and funny.